Guardians of Ga'Hoole 13 - The River of Wind

Where they were heading might constitute a maze of crosscurrents, and Mrs. P. sensed that the old navigation strategies were not going to work at all. She had afeeling that it was going to be more luck and intuition than anything else.
    Nonetheless, they set off on the course that Gylfie, known for her extraordinary navigational abilities, had set. As they flew, the smooth night air seemed an eerie prelude, a deceptive lead-in to what lay ahead.
    “First downdraft! I think I felt it! Subtle, but there,” Otulissa’s voice swelled with confidence.
    “Can we go up yet?” Martin asked.
    “Not quite. We need to find more turbulence before we start up.”
    Mrs. Plithiver knew, in the peculiar way that she knew many things, that the owls’ gizzards had been emboldened with this announcement. She felt Soren thrust forward in flight with a renewed energy.
    But as the minutes elapsed and the moon began its descent and another downdraft had yet to be detected, Mrs. Plithiver felt that confidence ebbing away. In relay teams of two, Otulissa and the others had flown out in radiating circles to locate another downdraft, but there was none to be found. They were in the darkest part of the night, normally a comforting time for owls, but now they knew that in a few more hours the night sky would become threadbare, the black leaking from it. At a time when they usually would be returning to theirhollows, here there was only the vast sea—no land, no trees, nothing. And worse than that, the sun would be rising behind them—a scalding sun, for the reflections would unroll ahead of them on the sea—and their eyes would blister in its uncompromising light.
    Mrs. Plithiver suddenly coiled tighter. “What is it, Mrs. P.?” Soren asked.
    “There’s something below, Soren.” The clouds were so thick at that moment it was hard to see what she was talking about. “It feels familiar. I think…I think…” She didn’t want to say it, but she knew that below them the wolf’s fang rock broke through the water. They were back to the exact same place they had been the previous night!
    A few seconds later, the clouds cleared off. A collective groan reverberated through the small company of owls and, exhausted, they began to circle in steep banking turns.
    Twilight landed first on the rock. “We’re back…back where we started from,” he said with great disgust.
    They were all silent. This rock had been the scene of their last good-byes to all the things they had treasured and now that they were back, it made those farewells seem false and those things that they treasured a bit tarnished.
    “What happened to that windkin?” Ruby moaned.
    “I say we just fly straight up and grab it,” Twilight boomed. “Flying straight out and looking for the odd downdraft didn’t get us anywhere, and look at all the energy we burned doing that.”
    “At high altitudes you burn energy much faster. It’s a fact, Twilight, and I don’t care how strong a flier you are,” Otulissa snapped.
    “Well, a fat lot of good your way is doing us. We’re just flying around in circles,” Twilight sneered.
    “I agree with Twilight,” Ruby said.
    “Stop bickering, the lot of you!” Mrs. P. reprimanded. “You’d think you were a bunch of chicks out on your first chaw practice.”
    “But what about the key?” Gylfie said in a whiny voice. “It’s supposed to work. Did you use it to gauge the temperature changes, Otulissa?”
    “There were no temperature changes.” Otulissa looked almost mournfully at the temperascope, a clever device that Ezylryb himself had invented for measuring changes in temperature. “The gauge never changed. Never went up, never went down. So the key was useless.” She sighed.
    “A key only works if you put it in the right slot,” Mrs. Plithiver said.
    “It’s not that kind of key, really, Mrs. P.,” Soren said. “And if it were, we obviously haven’t found the right slot.” Soren felt Mrs. P. give a slight shiver. It was a shiver of disapproval at his tone. She would not scold him out loud when they were with others, but she had ways of communicating her disapproval silently.
    “Well, how do we find the right slot?” Otulissa asked.
    “You’re overthinking the problem,” Mrs. P. said. “Use the key as a key.”
    “Now, what does that mean?” Twilight asked.
    She did not reply to the Great Gray, but swung her head and skewered Gylfie, the navigator, with her blind eyes. “Gylfie, you are navigating